"Taisen." Camaro's voice, sharp, already moving, her own hands closing over the yoke beside his, steadying it, correcting the drift before it could become anything worse than a stumble. "What's happening."
"The hand," Taisen said, low, forcing the words out through gritted teeth as feeling crawled back into his fingers in slow, painful increments, like blood returning to a limb that had fallen asleep, except this ache carried an undertone that had nothing to do with circulation and everything to do with a debt he had been quietly accruing since the vault and had just, for the first time, spent past what either hand alone could actually afford. "It's spreading. Faster than it should. I felt the good one go for a second there."
"Then let me fly," Camaro said, not a request, already easing him back from full control without waiting for permission, her own hands sure and steady where his had just failed. "You call the vector, I'll fly it. That's not you stepping back, Commander. That's you using the crew you actually have instead of trying to be the whole crew yourself."
Taisen didn't answer right away, feeling that gone another moment, watching his own fingers on the good hand curl and uncurl slow and uncertain in his lap, and found, with the clear-eyed honesty he'd learned to demand of himself even when it cost him something to admit, that she was right, and that arguing the point now would cost considerably more than simply agreeing to it.
"Take it," he said. "Gap's dead ahead, forty meters, hold the line I gave you and we're through the worst of the grid."
Camaro took it, and flew it clean, threading the narrow dead zone with a precision that owed nothing to Aether and everything to hard training and a steady hand, and the shuttle punched through the last of the turret grid's coverage into the relative shelter of the habitat cluster's docking collar with the hull ringing from a half dozen near misses and not a single clean hit anywhere on the frame.
"We're through," she said, easing the shuttle down against the collar's old, pitted seal with a gentleness that felt almost incongruous after the violence of the last ninety seconds. "Osei, get that hatch cycling the second we've got a seal. Commander." She looked over at him, something in her face that wasn't quite the needling humor she usually wore but wasn't fear either, something steadier and more direct. "How bad is the hand. Both hands. I need the honest number, not the one you think I can handle."
Taisen flexed the fingers on the good hand slowly, feeling them answer, thick and slow but answering, and looked down at the other one, the ruined one, and found the grey there had climbed, visibly, in the time since he'd last checked it at the viewport two nights ago, past the wrist now and creeping toward the middle of his forearm, a faint ashen tide advancing at a pace that had nothing gradual left in it.
"Past the wrist," he said, quiet, honest, because he'd promised himself and Alita both that hiding this cost from the people standing next to him was a debt of its own. "Climbing faster than it was a week ago. I don't know how much further it has room to go before it starts costing me something I can't get back by resting it. I intend to find out from Swan the moment we're back aboard, and I intend to tell him the truth about how it happened rather than the shortened version. But right now, we have a hatch to get through and however many people are on the other side of it, and I'd rather solve that problem with the hand I've still got left than spend what's left of tonight mourning the one I might be losing."
"Copy that," Camaro said, and did not push further, though something in the careful, watchful way she looked at him afterward told him plainly that the conversation had only been postponed, not closed.